The production of tobacco with decreased levels of nicotine is of interest, given concerns regarding the addictive nature of nicotine. Additionally, tobacco plants with extremely low levels of nicotine production, or no nicotine production, are attractive as recipients for transgenes expressing commercially valuable products such as pharmaceuticals, cosmetic components, or food additives. Various processes have been designed for the removal of nicotine from tobacco. However, most of these processes remove other ingredients from tobacco in addition to nicotine, thereby adversely affecting the tobacco. Classical crop breeding techniques have produced tobacco plants with lower levels of nicotine (approximately 8%) than that found in wild-type tobacco plants. Tobacco plants and tobacco having even further reductions in nicotine content are desirable.
One approach for reducing the level of a biological product is to reduce the amount of a required enzyme in the biosynthetic pathway leading to that product. Where the affected enzyme naturally occurs in a rate-limiting amount (relative to the other enzymes required in the pathway), any reduction in that enzyme's abundance will decrease the production of the end product. If the amount of the enzyme is not normally rate limiting, its presence in a cell must be reduced to rate-limiting levels in order to diminish the pathway's output. Conversely, if the naturally-occurring amount of enzyme is rate limiting, then any increase in the enzyme's activity will result in an increase in the biosynthetic pathway's end product.
Nicotine is formed primarily in the roots of the tobacco plant and is subsequently transported to the leaves, where it is stored (Tso, Physiology and Biochemistry of Tobacco Plants, pp. 233-34, Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Stroudsburg, Pa. (1972)). An obligatory step in nicotine biosynthesis is the formation of nicotinic acid from quinolinic acid, which step is catalyzed by the enzyme quinoline phosphoribosyl transferase (“QPRTase”). QPRTase appears to be a rate-limiting enzyme in the pathway supplying nicotinic acid for nicotine synthesis in tobacco. See, e.g., Feth et al., “Regulation in Tobacco Callus of Enzyme Activities of the Nicotine Pathway”, Planta, 168, pp. 402-07 (1986); Wagner et al., “The Regulation of Enzyme Activities of the Nicotine Pathway in Tobacco”, Physiol. Plant., 68, pp. 667-72 (1986). The modification of nicotine levels in tobacco plants by antisense regulation of putrescence methyl transferase (PMTase) expression is proposed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,369,023 and 5,260,205 to Nakatani and Malik. PCT application WO 94/28142 to Wahad and Malik 30 describes DNA encoding PMT and the use of sense and antisense PMT constructs.